STILLWATER – Oklahoma State head coach Eric Morris met with the media on Tuesday morning to put a bow on the loss to Tulsa and to look ahead to Oregon.
You can watch the entirety of his press conference in the video player above.
“I don't depend on anybody. Just that's all within me, right? And obviously, this is something that I've done before. I think when you're a head coach and you've gone through adverse situations and things have happened bad … I've said this before, it’s super easy to leave when things are going good, right? It's hard to lead when things aren't going good, right?
“And obviously, that's as bad as it gets, what we faced starting off the way that we started off with so much hype and whatever. And, as crazy as it sounds, people are saying, "Oh, he's just saying that.” I just told our team this. I'm happy in a way - not happy at all that we lost - we spend way too much time, resources, too many people over here that pour their heart and soul into this to want to go out there and have a performance like that.
“But the only thing that I'm excited about is where we're at right now as a program, as a team, where we did OK, where we were just awful and you start making a checklist of things you got to improve on, right? And can you do that all-in-one day? Absolutely not. I know exactly where we're at. There are things that obviously were not good. I could sit here and we could go over so many different things to be disappointed about, right?
“I thought we were a little off early and maybe we're extra excited right? We missed some early throws early in the game and then pressure got to us at certain points where we didn't protect very well and some of those throws weren't Drew’s problem. We had some busts on both sides of the football. That happens everywhere in America but those are things that exposed us in the game, right?
“We tell the truth to our players. We sat up here yesterday morning, in the first team meeting, and we had some hard discussions, and we watched it together. Football is one of those things; it’s the greatest team sport in the world. One person not doing their job exposes everybody in this program. That happened in a variety of different ways. And then the heat and were we in shape? Obviously, I didn't think that we were in good enough shape to play it. Just going back and watching and seeing our body language on the sideline, in the fourth quarter, and people throwing up.
“There's a bunch of issues. I'm not discounting that. I know that probably more than anybody. And there's things that we got to start addressing and we got to start building the program. This is the way that I've done it in the past, and I have full confidence in the way we're going to do it here again. Like now, is that acceptable, and okay? Like absolutely not. But like that's a spot. That's our starting point. Not a great one, and off we go. Right.”
